There are several approaches to building roles, and you must decide which ones are most convenient for you and your team.

High-quality roles strike a balance between readability and maintainability. For most people, the benefit of seeing the entire role in a single file outweighs the maintenance cost of repetition. Later, if you find the repetition burdensome, you can change your approach to reduce it. This might involve combining several similar roles into a more complex role, creating sub-roles that other roles can include, or pushing more complexity into your profiles.

So, begin with granular roles and deviate from them only in small, carefully considered steps.

Here's the basic Jenkins role we're starting with:

class role::jenkins::master {
include profile::base
include profile::server
include profile::jenkins::master
}

Reduced readability...maybe. Conditional logic isn't usually hard to read, especially in a simple case like this, but you might feel tempted to add a bunch of new custom facts to accommodate complex roles. This can make roles much harder to read, because a reader must also know what those facts mean.

In short, be careful of turning your node classification system inside-out. You might have a better time if you separate the roles and assign them with your node classifier.

Third approach: Nested roles

Another way of reducing repetition is to let roles include other roles.

In this example, we reduce boilerplate by having role::jenkins::master include role::server. When role::jenkins::master::release includes role::jenkins::master, it automatically gets role::server as well. With this approach, any given role only needs to:

Include the "parent" role that it most resembles.

Include the small handful of classes that differentiate it from its parent.

The benefits of this approach are:

You have fewer roles, and they're easy to maintain.

Increased visibility in your node classifier.

The drawbacks are:

Reduced readability: you have to open more files to see the real content of a role. This isn't much of a problem if you only go one level deep, but it can get wild around three or four.

Fourth approach: Multiple roles per node

In general, we recommend that you assign only one role to a node. In an infrastructure where nodes usually provide one primary service, that's the best way to work.

However, if your nodes tend to provide more than one primary service, it can make sense to assign multiple roles.

For example, say you have a large application that is usually composed of an application server, a database server, and a web server. To enable lighter-weight testing during development, you've decided to provide an "all-in-one" node type to your developers. You could do this by creating a new role::our_application::monolithic class, which includes all of the profiles that compose the three normal roles, but you might find it simpler to use your node classifier to assign all three roles (role::our_application::app, role::our_application::db, and role::our_application::web) to those all-in-one machines.

The benefit of this approach are:

You have fewer roles, and they're easy to maintain.

The drawbacks are:

There's no actual "role" that describes your multi-purpose nodes; instead, the source of truth for what's on them is spread out between your roles and your node classifier, and you must cross-reference to understand their configurations. This reduces readability.

The normal and all-in-one versions of a complex application are likely to have other subtle differences you need to account for, which might mean making your "normal" roles more complex. It's possible that making a separate role for this kind of node would reduce your overall complexity, even though it increases the number of roles and adds repetition.

Fifth approach: Super profiles

Since profiles can already include other profiles, you can decide to enforce an additional rule at your business: all profiles must include any other profiles needed to manage a complete node that provides that service.

For example, our profile::jenkins::master class could include both profile::server and profile::base, and you could manage a Jenkins master server by directly assigning profile::jenkins::master in your node classifier. In other words, a "main" profile would do all the work that a role usually does, and the roles layer would no longer be necessary.

The benefits of this approach are:

The chain of dependencies for a complex service can be more clear this way.

Depending on how you conceptualize code, this can be easier in a lot of ways!

The drawbacks are:

Loss of flexibility. This reduces the number of ways in which your roles can be combined, and reduces your ability to use alternate implementations of dependencies for nodes with different requirements.

Reduced readability, on a much grander scale. Like with nested roles, you lose the advantage of a clean, straightforward list of what a node consists of. Unlike nested roles, you also lose the clear division between "top-level" complete system configurations (roles) and "mid-level" groupings of technologies (profiles). Not every profile makes sense as an entire system, so you'll need some way to keep track of which profiles are the top-level ones.

Some people really find continuous hierarchies easier to reason about than sharply divided layers. If everyone in your organization is on the same page about this, a "profiles and profiles" approach might make sense. But we strongly caution you against it unless you're very sure; for most people, a true roles and profiles approach works better. Try the well-traveled path first.

Sixth approach: Building roles in the node classifier

Instead of building roles with the Puppet language and then assigning them to nodes with your node classifier, you might find your classifier flexible enough to build roles directly.

For example, you might create a "Jenkins masters" group in the console and assign it the profile::base, profile::server, and profile::jenkins::master classes, doing much the same job as our basic role::jenkins::master class.

Important:

If you're doing this, make sure you don't set parameters for profiles in the classifier. Continue to use Hiera / Puppet lookup to configure profiles.

This is because profiles are allowed to include other profiles, which interacts badly with the resource-like behavior that node classifiers use to set class parameters.

The benefits of this approach are:

Your node classifier becomes much more powerful, and can be a central point of collaboration for managing nodes.

Increased readability: A node's page in the console displays the full content of its role, without having to cross-reference with manifests in your role module.

The drawbacks are:

Loss of flexibility. The Puppet language's conditional logic is often more flexible and convenient than most node classifiers, including the console.

Your roles are no longer in the same code repository as your profiles, and it's more difficult to make them follow the same code promotion processes.